Tailor-made medicine: Is it practical?

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that certain drugs work better for certain patients and some have adverse effects. This variation may be due to several factors such as illness, differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs, environmental factors and genetic factors. Therefore, the analysis of the genes and genome will pave the way for effective diagnosis and management contributing to the development of personalized medicine. This treatment modality prescribes therapies specific to individual patients based on pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic information. This personalized medicine could be the key to developing patient-focused, cost-effective treatment from a dream to reality, however, some challenges exist.

Keywords

• Genes
• personalized medicine
• pharmacogenetics
• pharmacogenomics